On Monday, Ed wrote about Software Transparency, the idea that software is more resistant to intentional backdoors (and unintentional security vulnerabilities) if the process used to create it is transparent. Elements of software transparency include the availability of source code and the ability to read or contribute to a project’s issue tracker or internal developer discussion. He mentioned a case that I want to discuss in detail: in 2008, the Debian Project (a popular Linux distribution used for many web servers) announced that the pseudorandom number generator in Debian’s version of OpenSSL was broken and insecure.[Read more…]

Thanks to the recent NSA leaks, people are more worried than ever that their software might have backdoors. If you don’t believe that the software vendor can resist a backdoor request, the onus is on you to look for a backdoor. What you want is software transparency.

Transparency of this type is a much-touted advantage of open source software, so it’s natural to expect that the rise of backdoor fears will boost the popularity of open source code. [Read more…]

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